Haruki Murakami

Earlier this year we told you about Jonny doing the score for Norwegian Wood, a movie based on the Haruki Murakami novel. Well, the soundtrack was released on November 10 but before you get too excited, it is only available in Japan. Get ready to shell out some Yen. In addition to Greenwood, German Krautrockers Can are also included on the soundtrack.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood will reportedly return to film scoring, writing music for an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The score will be based on a composition Greenwood wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Greenwood’s last foray into feature films was his Grammy-nominated soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Just as that score was derived from an earlier work, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, Greenwood’s composition expands upon an orchestral piece called Dogwood, which debuted last month.

The maverick musician announced the project at BBC’s Maida Vale studios, following Dogwood’s premiere. “I wrote [the] piece mostly in hotels and dressing rooms while touring with Radiohead,” he told TwentyFourBit. “This was more practical than glamorous – lots of time sitting indoors, lots of instruments about – and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I [don't] think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written.” Greenwood is also listed on the film’s Imdb page.

Murakami’s 1987 novel, translated into English in 2000, follows Toru Watanabe’s nostalgic recollections of the late 60s. These memories are spurred by the sitar-strung sound of the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. The film version is directed by Anh Hung Tran, and will be released in Japan in December.

In the meantime, the Maida Vale performance of Dogwood will be re-broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 19 March. Greenwood’s first movie score, for the 2003 documentary Bodysong, will also soon see an encore: it will be released on DVD on 22 March.